garliclady - thanks for the information on the varieties that work for you. I ordered a one pound sampler from Charley's Farm. It arrived today, and the garlics are beautiful. I got: Asian Tempest, Gigantus (Rocambole), Chesnok Red, Polish Hardneck, Early Red Italian, Thermadrome and Silver White. All in all, I am very pleased with the good variety they sent, and I have taken one clove of each to taste. So far, I am much impressed!! :) The bulbs are all fresh and large. I have sent an inquiry to a grower for some Music if they have any left....I really would like some good large true garlic. I also have about a dozen huge cloves of elephant garlic that I grew myself, which I will plant next month, but I'd really like at least that much more of it. Trouble is, it's so darn expensive. What I grew was from an organic clove I bought at the grocery store. If you should happen to find out when the garlic festival in MD will be, and where, please do let me know. Thanks so much

The last two years I simply wrapped mine in frost cloth if it was going to get really cold. Well, last year I didn't have to, but I was set up for it by inserting three poles in the ground ahead of time. When it got to 17 I wrapped it, only because it was tiny. Now mine is a good size and I'll leave it. A friend in the neighborhood grows it just fine, no problems at all being hardy in the ground and evergreen. I would say if it's small and can afford itself little protection, mulch well, and wrap if necessary only when it hits those cold temps. and it's small but leave it where it is. If it's large, don't worry about it!

NH Babs my little drawing i did is by no means to scale. I doubt the walk way on the left will probably be no wider than 36-40”. I originally told the landscape architect to put the walk way against the house leaving larger planting beds against the black aluminium fencing we will have and he balked at that idea. He said it would look much nicer to have a bed on either side. He said the exposed concreted crawl space foundation will look nicer with shrubs in front of it. When he explained it that way it made sense to us. He proposed doing three free standing trellis features with a climbing flower vine on each. and tidy boxwood hedge in between those. There are only three small windows on that side of the house on the bottom level. so it’s mainly just a large expanse of siding. This was all verbal of course. We haven’t gotten any plans back from him yet. This is why I’m here though. Trying to get as much feed back and info as we can so we can be prepared and educated on plants and ideas as to work on this until we get it right. Our last home the architect drew it up based on what we said. We signed off and in the end we were never quite happy with what we got in comparison to the vision in my head. However i can’t blame them as we were not educated enough and prepared enough to make different suggestions or push back when we didn’t agree with them. We had a large lot with a whole lot of plants that made no sense. A huge amount of stamped concrete and we only used a small portion of it etc. We spent a ridiculous amount of money on something that we could never really bring to fruition. Hoping with a lot of research to avoid that this time around!

Last several winters we had snow for 2-3 days, and frost 10F ( -12C). I don't think that favabeans could survive that, but I don't have this experience with them. This winter was warmer, some peas (and cabbage) have survived and are blooming right now. I've got favabean seeds too late to plant them for the spring/summer crop, although I've planted a few just in case spring and june will cool enough.